Here are two nicely complementary videos, one from the US, one from the UK, that go into some detail on how grids balance conventional and renewable energy.
We hear the question “what do you do when the wind stops blowing/sun stops shining” from deniers hoping to capitalize on the average person’s ignorance of how the system works. Wind and Solar are “intermittent” power sources, but what many folks don’t understand is that that large traditional, fossil and nuclear plants are intermittent as well, often unpredictably so.
This recent item from the New York Times illustrates a whole new wild card that will make large thermal, especially nuclear, plants even more unpredictable in the future..
A reactor at the Millstone nuclear plant in Waterford, Conn., has shut down because of something that its 1960s designers never anticipated: the water in Long Island Sound was too warm to cool it.
Under the reactor’s safety rules, the cooling water can be no higher than 75 degrees. On Sunday afternoon, the water’s temperature soared to 76.7 degrees, prompting the operator, Dominion Power, to order the shutdown of the 880-megawatt reactor.
“Temperatures this summer are the warmest we’ve had since operations began here at Millstone,’’ said a spokesman for Dominion, Ken Holt. The plant’s first reactor, now retired, began operation in 1970.
The plant’s third reactor was still running on Monday, but engineers were watching temperature trends carefully out of concern that it, too, might have to shut down.
A spokeswoman for the regional grid control center, ISO-New England, said the shutdown had not impaired the functioning of the grid because generation has been more than sufficient. But in periods when industrial demand for electricity has been stronger, a reactor shutdown has sometimes forced grid operators to scramble.
Both videos give an inside look into how grid operators work, and how they are planning for the increasing mix of energy options that are coming in the future.
Second video, highly recommended, below:
Here’s a link to the wind map cited in the first video:
http://hint.fm/wind/
And here’s a breezy look at what happens in the UK at “Electric Mountain” in Wales when the demand for tea rises dramatically:
The party line of elected officials is just to say “Well solar/wind is great ,but what do you do when the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow”..It is the Party Line in Okla,so this will help me..thanks..I have to get the reply down to a short sentence
watch here to see how unpredictably big thermal units can trip offline.
solar and wind do not do this.
It would depend on what the cause is for a station unexpectedly going offline. I would think that transmission failures could happen to any kind of power generation.
What sort of redundancy, if any, is built into the transmission infrastructure from a power plant, into the grid?
Good Info.
BTW:
I just found that I can save money AND go 100% Wind/Hydo by changing my energy company. In Pittsburgh, this non-profit (reviewed in this newspaper article), is what I just used:
http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/local/region/company-selling-cheaper-green-energy-324757/
The paragraph that got my comfort level was:
…
So far marketing of the collaborative electricity offering has been limited to newsletters put out by the Thomas Merton Center, East End Food Co-op and various neighborhood groups. Ads are planned soon in the City Paper and on a billboard along the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
…
I know and trust the Thomas Merton Center people.
It would be great if there were an active campaign nationwide to allow people to do the same. Some place that watchdogs the energy brokers and keeps them honest.
Love to setup a feedback loop that forces a move AWAY from fossil fuels. Too many exponentials driving us to oblivion.
Sam Seder covered this story last night and made two points about it:
Nuclear Reactor Unprepared For Global Warming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1EB5jRwjmY&list=UU-3jIAlnQmbbVMV6gR7K8aQ&index=3&feature=plcp
1. This story was by the same journalist who made one about heat problems and how they were impacting infrastructure in July and in NEITHER story pointed out that global warming will make these problems worse and may be part of why we are dealing with more heat stress to our infrastructure.
2. That the nuclear industry is playing fast and loose with safety to keep their profit margins up (especially the point that they tried to get away with taking measurements at three points to get around the high water temps and that they are ‘sharpening their pencils’ to see if they can get away with using higher temps for the reactor, in other words trying to decrease the safety margin of error).
This is why I’m not keen on trying to keep the old reactors going for as long as possible to keep down carbon pollution. Either build new ones or put any money on maintenence into shutting down the old ones and putting the rest of the money in renewables and efficiency.
To say nothing about the costs of Decommissioning. And decommissioning brings into play the costs of long term (250,000 years long) waste storage. (Don’t put a nickel in that slot. 😉
Oops wrong video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1EB5jRwjmY
Yeah junk good point plus we haven’t ever decomissioned nuclear plants as big as we have now so there is a good chance there will be more costs than we anticipate. Plus other ‘costs’ we find out along the way.
It’s my biggest nuclear power worry: the economics of keeping plants open WAY past their design life will mean that the probability of a domestic Fukashima go up considerably with time.
I think it’s Arnie Gundersen’s big worry too:
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20120318/GREEN01/203180315/Arnie-Gundersen-40-years-not-middle-age-nuke-plants
Now that’s scary!
greenman3610
The videos aren’t loading for me. All I get is a black square. Could you tell me what type of video these are, so I can find out what “plug in” on my computer stopped working. This is a new issue, and has happened at other sites.
Thanks
I just downloaded and installed Quicktime recently.
Try getting Firefox, and then getting/updating Flash.
What if houses came with large batteries that charged at night to fill the grid’s bathtub? The batteries could be used to supplement peak time, etc. I wonder who’s working on that? Perhaps i’ll Google it…
Hi Andrew,
Re: ” I wonder who’s working on that?”
The City of Fairbanks, AK has a massive battery backup system.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/08/dayintech_0827
More recently, Oahu island in Hawaii has been tying in a battery backup system with wind generation:
http://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/siemens-develops-modular-power-storage-renewable-energy.html
Generally speaking, the large swarms of batteries at residences which will “fill the bathtub” will be incorporated into electric vehicles.
Thanks Ray,
Yeah, those are some big batteries! When I googled, I found one fella who had made his own home set up, but the youtube video on his blog posting was missing, as he had closed his account.
Then I found Solar City was teaming up with the electric car maker, Tesla, and working towards residential (and business) solar/battery kits, using Solar City/Sun Run’s business model (rebate grabbing):
http://gigaom.com/cleantech/tesla-solarcity-quietly-selling-building-battery-projects/
But it didn’t mention if the batteries could be charged via the grid or not.
Was it on this blog that there was a story about EV’s in Japan that were able to power one’s house in emergencies? I saw that somewhere….
See ya –
If and when EVs become commonplace, there are EV-to-grid methods that could be used to send power back to the grid on demand.
Another promising tech that uses very cheap materials and claims to be as efficient as hydro is the Pumped Heat Electricity Storage system being developed by Isentropic UK
Nice comments everyone. Aging reactors ready to fail while the NRC just keeps extending licenses. What’s the hot article in IEEE Spectrum? How to keep those reactors running for 80 years, instead of their original lifetime of 40 years. How? Just test more. Fantasy. All reactors have vast plumbing exposed to radiation, extreme heat, and pressure. The results are leaks. San Onofre shut down because of this. In this case, it was because of faulty design of newly installed cooling tubes. Yes, check out Arnie Gundersen at Fairewinds.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/05/edison-san-onofre-design-changes.html
Hey, it’s Kryten! In the second vid. (Really, can there be no Red Dwarf fans out there?)
Nice pair of movies – I’ll be using these in future debates with the ‘renewables are Communism and will never work’ brigade…
Reblogged this on Climate Force.
“Had the $650 billions+ spent on Iraq, been spent on conventional Solar/Thermal development of South Western U.S.A., today: Americans would receive a “Return On Investment”, in place of horrendous tax rates to service unpayable debt to China, for war. Americans would be gainfully working, using this renewable, perpetual, eternal, electricity source ( oil wells do go dry – the Sun never stops shining, Wind blows forever) to compete in world markets with products, and much less foreign oil would be imported. This is the lost “opportunity cost” for having Saddam’s scrotum on the Bushes mantlepiece? Shiite eh!”
Now about the Prairie Wind Corridor? Perpetual, renewable, eternal, domestic, clean, waste free, (never to run dry like an oil or gas well) electricity to add to any “Grid” charge electric car batteries, but not good enough for the Americans?
www,theoildrum.com/node/4971 for why Americans cannot enjoy cheaper cleaner near waste free Thorium fissioned power.
Add in all the unnecessary military spending since ’80, incl the ridiculous numbers of troops stationed overseas, still fighting WW2, and the America would have infrastructure that would be the envy of entire world.
There’s a good chance the debt would be less than 1/4 what it is now, too.